Regional Housing Mobility and Interdistrict School Integration: What We Know and What We Need to Do. Mobility Works America Elizabeth Julian

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1 July/August 2015 Volume 24: Number 4 Regional Housing Mobility and Interdistrict School Integration: What We Know and What We Need to Do In two major recent studies, Professor Raj Chetty and his colleagues found substantial increases in adult income levels and long-term educational attainments for children who move to and grow up in lower-poverty communities especially where children stay in these neighborhoods for a substantial period of time. This research builds on findings from the Moving to Opportunity research that had already found substantial health benefits for women and girls who move to low poverty neighborhoods. It also builds on several decades of educational research demonstrating strong short- and longterm educational benefits for low-income children attending racially and economically integrated schools (see All of this research confirms what practitioners have long known, that relief from segregation isn t just a right, it is also good for children. Accordingly, in this issue, we are not going to go over this ground again. Instead, we turn our attention to what needs to be done: what are the barriers standing in our way, and how can we make housing and school integration work in more of our segregated metropolitan areas? the editors Mobility Works America Elizabeth Julian In 1978, Congress chartered the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, a non-profit organization to support community development in the United States. NRC was chartered based on the belief that investing in local community development organizations was the best way to revitalize lower-income communities and address the conditions of slum and blight that impacted so many people in those Elizabeth Julian (ekjulian@ inclusivecommunities.net), a PRRAC Board member, is President of the Inclusive Communities Project in Dallas. This article is drawn from a longer piece in development calling for a more balanced federal housing investment strategy. Part 1 (this issue), sets out an initial view of what a national housing mobility program on the scale of communities. In 2005, NRC began doing business as NeighborWorks America. NWA provides grants and technical assistance to more than 240 community development organizations working in nearly 4,400 urban, suburban and rural communities across the country. NWA also provides training for community housing and development professionals through its national training institutes. It had total revenues NeighborWorks might look like. In Part II (next issue), a proposal for a new opportunity-based CDFI program, first introduced in a 2008 article for the Urban Institute, will be reintroduced as model for directing additional federal resources toward fostering more open and inclusive communities, building on another successful model in the community development field. of approximately $248 million in , most of which were government grants (NWA is one of several specially earmarked annual appropriations for community development organizations). NWA is an excellent model for a new national housing mobility initia- (Please turn to page 2) CONTENTS: Mobility Works America 1 Neighborhood Mobility. 3 TDHCA v. ICP... 5, 17 Neighborhood Diversity 9 Inter-District School Integation...13 PRRAC Update Resources Poverty & Race Research Action Council th Street NW Suite 200 Washington, DC / FAX: 202/ info@prrac.org Recycled Paper

2 (MOBILITY WORKS: from page 1) tive to support families living in highpoverty, highly distressed areas who would like to live in areas with less poverty, less crime, less distress and more opportunity. The recent studies on housing mobility by Raj Chetty and colleagues culminate decades of research and evaluation of housing mobility as an anti-poverty strategy for low income families. From the Northwestern University evaluations of the Gautreaux families experience in Chicago, through two decades of research and evaluation of the data coming from HUD s Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, there is now clear and convincing evidence that letting low-income families move from highpoverty neighborhoods to neighborhoods with more opportunities has a positive impact on children s life chances in terms of health, education and economic well-being. There is also now clear and convincing (and gutwrenching) evidence that the life chances of children growing up in areas of high poverty and severe distress are significantly diminished. It is time for creation of a Congressionallychartered housing mobility non-profit organization to support housing mobility for low-income families in distressed communities who choose to take that path out. It could operate much as NWA does. Housing mobility organizations, Poverty & Race (ISSN ) is published six times a year by the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, th Street NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20036, 202/ , fax: 202/ , info@prrac.org. Chester Hartman, Editor. Subscriptions are $25/year, $45/two years. Foreign postage extra. Articles, article suggestions, letters and general comments are welcome, as are notices of publications, conferences, job openings, etc. for our Resources Section. Articles generally may be reprinted, providing PRRAC gives advance permission. Copyright 2015 by the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. All rights reserved. Possible Congressional findings for MobilityWorks America (a) The Congress finds that (1) Moving To Opportunity demonstration has proven its worth as a successful program to improve the life chances of low-income children by providing them housing vouchers, counseling and housing search assistance to move from areas of high poverty and urban distress to areas of low poverty and greater opportunity. (2) The demand for housing mobility counseling services in cities throughout the United States warrants the creation of a public corporation to institutionalize and expand housing mobility counseling services, and other related services which promote access of low-income families living in highpoverty areas to areas with lower poverty, less crime, better schools, healthier environments, and access to greater economic opportunity. (b) The purpose of this subchapter is to establish a public corporation which will continue and expand the efforts of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to promote access to opportunity for low-income children and their families by working cooperatively with local housing providers, housing authorities, governments, schools, and the broader community to allow children to escape the life-sapping experience of living in neighborhoods of high poverty, high crime, environmental hazards, failing schools, and lack of economic opportunity, by moving to neighborhoods of safety, security and opportunity. like community development organizations, are best operated at the local level, working directly with the families who live in highly distressed areas, and providing counseling and related support and assistance to help the family find the right place for them in the broader housing market. While housing mobility organizations have never been funded to the degree that CDC s have, by government or philanthropic organizations, the metrics of success for children making these moves are now clear. And there are such organizations in communities around the country to build on and learn from. The regional mobility programs in Chicago, Baltimore and Dallas which assist families participating in the Housing Choice Voucher program are examples of what can be accomplished even with little reliable government or philanthropic support. It is time to invest in building a network of local housing mobility organizations that can provide the same sort of expertise and support to families that want to live in higher-opportunity areas, as the CDCs provide to local communities on the issues of reinvest- ment and revitalization. While much has been accomplished by CDCs in the past 35 years, it is now clear that there is no silver bullet when it comes to dealing with decades of entrenched poverty, segregation and neglect. Giving families who would like a choice to live in higher-opportunity communities a chance to do so is an anti-poverty policy that makes sense and that deserves equivalent support alongside our long-standing efforts to revitalize high-poverty communities. So, how could it work? The purpose of this short piece is to plant the seed of an idea which will hopefully engage law and policy makers, experts, advocates and low-income families to work together to provide a robust and creative answer to that question. However, the NRC/NWA model is an excellent place to start, given its mission and history. The NWA Board of Directors consists of high-level government officials, including the Secretary of HUD, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system, a member of the Chief Counsel Office of the (Please turn to page 11) 2 Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August 2015

3 Housing Mobility: Why Is It So Controversial? Alexander Polikoff Origins: A Desegregation Remedy Housing mobility dates to the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision in BPI s Gautreaux litigation. Lower courts had found the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development guilty of knowingly funding racial discrimination in Chicago. The discrimination was that to prevent African Americans from entering white neighborhoods via subsidized housing, the Chicago Housing Authority was building virtually all of its thousands of public housing apartments in black neighborhoods. A unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the remedy for HUD s wrongdoing could be metropolitan-wide and didn t have to be confined within Chicago s geographic boundaries. In the wake of that ruling, rather than chance whatever remedial arrangement lower courts might order, Alexander Polikoff (apolikoff@ bpichicago.org) served as Executive Director of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI), a Chicago law and policy center, from , and continues on BPI s staff as lead counsel for the plaintiff class in BPI s ongoing Gautreaux public housing litigation. Polikoff is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on housing, civil liberties and urban affairs, and of Housing the Poor: The Case for Heroism (1977), Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto (2006), and The Path Still Open: A Greater Chance for Peace Than Ever Before (2009). In 2006, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of The American Lawyer magazine. Why wasn t the Gautreaux experience transformed into national policy? There are several reasons. BPI and HUD agreed on a settlement. In 1974 Congress had enacted a new form of subsidized housing called Section 8 Certificates, later renamed Housing Choice Vouchers. Vouchers pay a portion of a tenant s rent in privately owned homes and apartments; instead of being confined to publicly owned housing, families with vouchers could theoretically move wherever they wished. For minority families in inner-city neighborhoods, however, a voucher by itself was not a ticket out of segregation. Under the Gautreaux settlement, HUD not only supplied vouchers to Gautreaux families but also paid for search assistance and counseling. The assistance was to make it realistically possible for inner-city families to move from segregated to integrated or predominantly white neighborhoods. Which is what happened. During the next 22 years (the agreed life of the settlement), over 7,000 families, almost all African-American and very poor, were enabled to move out of segregated, inner-city Chicago. Some moved to outlying city neighborhoods, but most moved to suburbs that were predominantly white and had far lower poverty rates than inner-city Chicago. Housing mobility vouchers plus counseling and search assistance was born. Moving to the suburbs appeared to be a good thing for most of the Gautreaux families who did it. Sociologists at Northwestern University, studying the experiences of both suburban-movers and families who remained in the city, came up with some startling conclusions. For example, children of suburban-movers were four times more likely than those of city-movers to finish high school, twice as likely to attend college, and far more likely to find jobs. Suburban-moving mothers were also more likely to be employed. A social scientist in the audience at one of the Northwestern presentations said that if by moving to suburbs inner-city black families could achieve the life-enhancing results being reported, policymakers should drop other initiatives and concentrate on housing mobility. Why Didn t Housing Mobility Take Off? Given the Gautreaux program s favorable results, why didn t housing mobility take off? Why wasn t the Gautreaux experience transformed into national policy? There are several reasons. (Please turn to page 4) Michael E. Stone This issue of Poverty & Race is dedicated to the life and work of Michael E. Stone,who passed away in May, 2015 and whose research, writings and activism on housing affordability and the links of housing, beyond physical shelter, to site and setting, neighbors and community, municipality and public services, habitability, accessibility, rights and responsibilities, costs and benefits deeply influenced the field. Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August

4 (MOBILITY: Continued from page 3) Moving to Opportunity. One was MTO the letters stand for Moving to Opportunity a ten-year ( ) HUD demonstration designed to test Gautreaux results in which over 4,000 families in five different cities participated. When MTO was over and evaluated, its results were mixed. Although compared to non-movers the moving families showed improvements in physical and mental health, there were no short-term employment and educational gains beyond those experienced by the control group (it was not until recently, in Raj Chetty and colleagues research on long-term outcomes, that the powerful educational and income benefits for children were finally documented). These early non-results cast doubt on the whole housing mobility enterprise for almost a decade. As Robert Sampson, a NYU sociologist, put it, MTO publications and presentations appear to have cast doubt on the general thesis that neighborhoods matter in the lives of poor individuals (Sampson 2008: 191). That thesis is of course the bedrock upon which housing mobility rests. MTO was not just a bump in the road; it was a dagger pointed at the heart of housing mobility. Why undertake the challenges of helping families escape severely distressed neighborhoods if moving to better neighborhoods doesn t matter? Later analyses, however, disclosed flaws in MTO s structure and implementation that explained why MTO families didn t experience Gautreauxlike results. For example, because (unlike-gautreaux) the MTO demonstration did not employ a segregation/integration criterion for receiving neighborhoods, many MTO families moved short distances, often within the same school district, into heavily minority areas. Famed Harvard scholar William Julius Wilson concluded that MTO tells us little about... the effect of neighborhood on the development of children and families (Wilson 2010: 209). And two recent landmark studies demonstrate that neighborhoods matter a great deal in the lives of individuals, indeed across generations (Sampson 2012; Sharkey 2013). But the damage had been done, and for years conventional opinion held that MTO proved mobility didn t work. Entrenched exclusion of African Americans from privileged places. Fewer aspects of the American experience are more deeply ingrained than racial residential segregation, especially of African Americans. The story of how government policy (federal, state and local) and private prejudice have combined over generations and still combine to this day to keep black Fifty years of placebased revitalization policies have yielded very little durable progress. Americans from living in white neighborhoods is an oft-told tale that will not be repeated here. (See the references at the end of this article.) Because the thrust of mobility is precisely to enable poor families of color, particularly African Americans, to move into predominantly white neighborhoods, mobility confronts directly the powerful social and political forces in American society designed to protect against that happening. Privileging Place-Based Strategies. The power of social exclusion has been abetted by the continuing debate between so called placebased strategies to improve severely distressed neighborhoods and mobility programs intended to enable families to escape from them. Place-based strategies seek to improve conditions within distressed neighborhoods, through economic development and upgraded facilities and amenities, in order to revitalize them. These strategies do not threaten white communities with incoming black families, and they attract constituencies, such as community development corporations and private developers, with financial stakes in the programs. The combination has led to over fifty years of focus on place-based programs variously called community development, neighborhood revitalization, and the like. (From this perspective, mobility, apart from enabling black families to move into white neighborhoods and lacking constituencies, is sometimes seen as undermining place-based initiatives by facilitating the departure of poor but motivated families from the very places to be revitalized.) Yet fifty years of place-based revitalization policies have yielded very little durable progress (to borrow Pat Sharkey s phrase) and, even though many proponents of place-based initiatives agree that mobility should be a part of any strategy to improve the lives of families trapped in severely distressed neighborhoods (Goetz 2003: ; Sharkey 2013: ), a continuing bias in favor of place-based strategies has made it difficult for mobility to gain traction. Gun-Shy Bureaucracy. In the face of these powerful sources of entrenched opposition to housing mobility, the HUD bureaucracy that sets rules for the voucher program has often feared charges of social engineering, in spite of many years of doing just that. Even in the relatively progressive Obama Administration, reform has been painfully slow (PRRAC, 2013), with HUD continuing to be gun-shy about encouraging a program that would facilitate the movement of poor black families into white neighborhoods. Moreover, the cost savings, realized when children and their families are healthier, better educated, and less likely to need public assistance or run afoul of the criminal justice system, accrue to other agencies, not HUD. So, with little to gain financially and risks to run politically, instead of mandating mobility services, HUD has maintained rules that favor speedy issuance and use of vouchers over finding good locations. For most African- American families, the rules typically mean a hurried rent-up racing against expiration of the voucher search time (usually an inadequate 90 days) in a familiar, black-segregated, high-poverty neighborhood. Indeed, HUD rules actually incent- 4 Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/Auust 2015

5 Housing Mobility and Concentrated Poverty ivize administrators to shovel out and it is hard to find enough landlords newly issued vouchers as quickly as in white working- and middle-class possible and shun mobility, for the neighborhoods willing to rent homes latter takes more time (to find available dwellings in good neighborhoods) Even in a supportive environment, free housing mobility programs include: and apartments to families of color. The multiple reasons we support and costs extra money (for counseling, housing search assistance and the socio-political objection, no one trapped in segregated high-poverty of the attitudes spawned by MTO and fairness to African-American families higher rents in destination neighborhoods). HUD argues that because would be possible in the real world of ever limited a way, generations of really knows how much mobility neighborhoods; remedying, in how- voucher funding is limited to what tight rental markets and racial prejudice. benefiting the larger society by en- government-fostered segregation; and Congress appropriates (vouchers are not entitlements ; there are long waiting lists), the extra costs mean that two large mobility programs in Balticome productive citizens instead of The result has been that except for abling more children of color to be- fewer families can be served. Serving more and Dallas operating under court victims caught in the welfare and fewer families is indeed HUD s favorite reason for not fostering mobility. less than a dozen smaller (and inter- years, post-gautreaux research on the orders in Gautreaux-type lawsuits, and criminal justice systems. In recent Why the reason is unpersuasive is explained below. across the country, mobility is an idea young children has deepened undermittently funded) programs scattered effects of concentrated poverty on Mobility is Difficult. Finally, whose time has not yet come. Indeed, standing of this last reason. mobility is hard to do. It is hard for given the obstacles, one cannot but At least since Dickens indelibly families to move into unfamiliar, distant, sometimes hostile neighborhoods, are we engaged in what may seem a riences, policymakers and social sci- wonder whether it ever will. Why then rendered Oliver Twist s searing expefar from familiar support networks, quixotic endeavor? (Please turn to page 6) Disparate Impact Upheld Last week s Supreme Court decision in Texas v. Inclusive Communities Project, holding that disparate impact is cognizable under the Fair Housing Act, sparked much celebration as a victory for civil rights. Decades of precedent will remain standing, the constitutional foundation of this Act and other civil rights legislation is unshaken, and the important enforcement efforts of our colleagues in government and elsewhere can continue. Justice Kennedy s opinion focused largely on the results-based language of the Act, relying on its sibling statutes, Title VII and the ADEA, as interpretive guides. The opinion acknowledged disparate impact doctrine s crucial role in permitting victims of discrimination to counteract unconscious prejudices and disguised animus In this way disparate-impact liability may prevent segregated housing patterns that might otherwise result from covert and illicit stereotyping. The opinion also detailed some of the same historical elements highlighted by the respondents and the amicus briefs: in particular, that concerns about entrenched segregation and racial exclusion sparked the Act s passage and have undergirded its application over the years. Although the opinion cautions that remedies should be race-neutral in order to avoid triggering serious constitutional questions, Justice Kennedy adheres to the framework established by the 2007 Parents Involved case, which made allowances for policy architecture that considers racial composition. ( While the automatic or pervasive injection of race into public and private transactions covered by the FHA has special dangers, it is also true that race may be considered in certain circumstances and in a proper fashion as with school site selection and attendance zoning.) Fair housing accountability and outcome-based programs will remain a focus of advocacy, as crucial mechanisms for integration a benefit for our society in full (accruing to all racial groups), including our future generations. Congratulations to the Inclusive Communities Project (ICP President Betsy Julian and Vice President Demetria McCain are members of PRRAC s Board), to their lawyers, Mike Daniel and Laura Beshara, and to all of the lawyers and organizations who weighed in as amicus curiae. See Professor Florence Wagman Roisman s assessment of the decision at page 17, below! Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August

6 (MOBILITY: Continued from page 5) entists have been thinking about poverty. But focused thinking about concentrated poverty did not begin until the 1987 publication of William Julius Wilson s The Truly Disadvantaged. In the ensuing years society has learned a great deal about the effects of concentrated poverty. The challenges of being poor are familiar and can be summarized in a phrase the daily struggle for survival. But the challenges of being poor and living in a really poor place are worse, a kind of double jeopardy. A study by that very name cites research showing that even if children live in a highpoverty neighborhood for a limited time, negative effects on verbal ability linger after departure from the neighborhood (Hernandez 2012: 10). A Brookings Institution Study asks, Why Does Concentrated Poverty Matter? and answers with a list that includes limited educational opportunity, high crime, poor health, and many more (Kneebone et al. 2011). Recent research is showing that the worst of these negative effects is visited upon young children. The ACE Study. The Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE Study, is the largest examination ever conducted of the effects of childhood abuse, neglect and other stressors on adult mental and physical health (Felitti et al. 1998). The results demonstrate an astonishing correlation between childhood adversity and adult well-being. As a result of the ACE Study, childhood adversity is often termed America s most important public health issue. Although the ACE Study establishes correlation, not causation, medical research is exposing the causal links. For example, one study finds that early, repeated activation of the body s stress system actually alters brain chemistry. A consequence is that adults who have experienced early trauma often show increased aggression, impulsive behavior and weakened cognition. From countless sources in the literature, but also from common sense, we know that severely distressed neighborhoods are places where stress and trauma are pervasive. We know therefore that high ACE scores are likely to be accumulated not only within households the focus of the ACE Study but also within the geography of concentrated poverty. But a high ACE score is not just a number. Children with a score of four or above are more than twice as likely as those with a score of zero to have heart or lung disease in adulthood, and over four times more likely to suffer depression. A male child with an ACE score of six is forty-six times more likely than one with a zero score to Nearly half of poor black children (45%) live in concentrated poverty tracts, nine times the rate for poor white children. use drugs intravenously as an adult. Children with a score of six or more die on average two decades earlier than those with zero scores. Statistically speaking, therefore, children growing up in concentrated poverty neighborhoods face a high risk of blighted adulthoods. Hundreds of studies, writes William Julius Wilson, suggest that concentrated poverty increases the likelihood of joblessness, dropping out of school, lower educational achievement, involvement in crime, and so on (Wilson 2010: 46). That conclusion comes from an academic. Around the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin wrote in nonacademic language to his nephew and namesake that he had been set down in a ghetto... born into a society in which your countrymen have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives (Baldwin 1962). Getting Worse? Concentrated poverty in the social science literature is generally viewed as a neighborhood a census tract with a poverty rate of 30 or 40% or more, although 20% is the threshold at which the negative effects of concentrated poverty are said to appear. Social scientists generally view the poverty rate as a rough proxy for the characteristics associated with severely distressed neighborhoods. Recent data tell us that we have more of such places than ever before. Since 2000, both the number of concentrated poverty census tracts and the number of poor people living in them has increased by some 50% (Jargowsky 2013: 3). Despite some geographic spreading out, the tracts are predominantly in a small number of cities within large metropolitan areas. For example, in the Chicago area, 97 of 115 concentrated poverty tracts and 88% of persons living within them are in the city of Chicago (Jargowsky 2013: 15). Nationwide, nearly 8 million children live in concentrated poverty census tracts, over half of them in double jeopardy because in addition to living in very poor places, their families are in poverty (Casey 2012: 1). In some large cities, over half the entire child population lives in concentrated poverty neighborhoods (Casey 2012: 2). For African Americans, the statistics are especially sobering nearly half of poor black children (45%) live in concentrated poverty tracts, nine times the rate for poor white children (Casey 2012: 2). To repeat that startling statistic for emphasis, nearly half of poor African- American children live in concentrated poverty neighborhoods. Given that we now know that, with high statistical likelihood, these children will suffer blighted adulthoods, this is a shocker. We are talking about the appalling fact that nearly one of every two poor African-American children in this country faces a high risk of a blighted adulthood. Though he lacked the data we now possess, that is what James Baldwin may well have meant when he wrote fifty years ago of the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives. What to Do? What can society do about this ongoing destruction of the lives of Afri- 6 Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August 2015

7 can-american children? Here are some possibilities, and the difficulties each faces. (1) Undo the residential segregation that is the root cause of the problem? Volumes of history explain how deeply entrenched and intractable is this root cause. Data show that for decades there have been only very modest changes in the segregation of African Americans, and virtually none at all in the big cities in which most African Americans live. Segregation in schools, closely linked to residential segregation, is actually increasing. (2) Revitalize concentrated poverty neighborhoods? Despite often heroic efforts, multiple studies show that after a half century of trying, precious few revitalizing initiatives have been successful. HUD s recent Choice Neighborhoods Initiative is trying to learn from some of these past efforts, and reinvest in more carefully targeted ways. But even if this new approach proves to be more successful, we need to recognize that revitalization takes a long time and doesn t necessarily have the potential to benefit current generations of children. To pursue neighborhood revitalization without at least an equal commitment to housing mobility means writing off the great potential of many of these children. (3) Enable African-American children to attend middle-class schools? Though this approach can be successful in some segregated metropolitan areas (see accompanying article, page 13), it is less feasible in the largest segregated cities in which most African Americans live. (4) Housing mobility? We ve described the challenges and they are considerable. But Gautreaux, Baltimore and Dallas mobility programs show that it has been and can be done at the scale of thousands of families. Which is to say that of the four remedial approaches listed, mobility is the most practical. As to the objection that spending money on mobility means serving fewer families, there are these answers. First, vouchers may be viewed as serving two groups of families: those in desperate need of shelter, any shelter; and those in desperate need of escaping concentrated poverty. Given what we now know about (Please turn to page 8) Resources Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing at HUD: A First Term Report Card (PRRAC, January 2013), available at pubs.php. Annie E. Casey Foundation KIDSCOUNT Data Snapshot on High-Poverty Communities. Baltimore: The Annie E. Casey Foundation (available at Baldwin, James A Letter to My Nephew, Progressive, December (available at /letter-my-nephew) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Housing Vouchers Help Families Live in Better Neighborhoods But They Can Do More, available at Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren & Lawrence F. Katz The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. The Equality of Opportunity Project DeLuca, Stefanie, Philip M. E. Garboden & Peter Rosenblatt Segregating Shelter: How Housing Policies Shape the Residential Locations of Low-Income Minority Families, The AN- NALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 647: DeLuca, Stefanie & Peter Rosenblatt Sandtown-Winchester Baltimore s Daring Experiment in Urban Renewal: 20 Years Later, What Are the Lessons Learned? The Abell Report 26 (8): 1-12 (available at Engdahl, Lora New Homes, New Neighborhoods, New Schools: A Progress Report on the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program. Washington, DC: Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) (available at BaltimoreMobilityReport.pdf) Goetz, Edward G Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Hernandez, Donald J Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation. Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation (available at gradelevelreading.net) Inclusive Communities Project, Inc Mobility Works. April (available at Jargowsky, Paul A Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium: Changes in the Prevalence, Composition, and Location of High-Poverty Neighborhoods. New York: The Century Foundation and Rutgers Center for Urban Research and Education (available at of_poverty_in_the_new_millennium.pdf) Julian, Elizabeth Making Wrong Right: The Search for a Durable Urban Policy, Poverty & Race (September/October) (available at Kahlenberg, Richard D All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public School Choice. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Kneebone, Elizabeth, Carey Nadeau & Alan Berube The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution (available at Kubisch, Anne C., Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown & Tom Dewar Voices From the Field III: Lessons and Challenges From Two Decades of Community Change Efforts. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute (available at (Please turn to page 8) Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August

8 (MOBILITY: Continued from page 7) the grievously harmful lifelong effects of growing up in concentrated poverty, it is not sound policy to structure the voucher program to serve only the first group. Second, setting realistic ceiling rents to avoid overpaying in distressed neighborhoods will ameliorate some of the extra cost. Third, the concern about maximizing the number of families served must be tempered by HUD s basic goal of providing decent housing in a decent environment. A recent study, examining voucher programs in the fifty most populous metropolitan areas, comes to the disheartening conclusion that vouchers have actually perpetuated the concentrated poverty and racial segregation that they are intended to challenge. (Metzger 2014: 544) Finally, apart from the moral imperative to avoid destroying hundreds of thousands of lives, enabling children to grow up in safe neighborhoods with good schools and working families is likely to reduce health, welfare and criminal justice costs and in the long run to be beneficial, even in a narrow fiscal sense, to the larger society. Getting Children Out of Harm s Way In the Baltimore mobility program, families with children under age eight who live in Baltimore City s concentrated poverty census tracts are being given a priority for available vouchers, accompanied by high-quality counseling and housing search assistance. The results, as in Gautreaux years ago, are beginning to come in. One mother, enabled to move to a Baltimore suburb, puts it succinctly: I think moving saved my family s lives. (McDaniels 2014) Our national voucher policy can and should include Baltimore-style initiatives, which set aside some of HUD s scarce housing vouchers for distribution to those willing and able (with counseling and search assistance) to use them in safe neighborhoods with good schools. The aspirations and rights of these families and children are why the seemingly quixotic mobility objective remains high on our agenda. Resources, continued from page 7 Massey, Douglas S. & Nancy A. Denton American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press McDaniels, Andrea K Moving Families to Combat Aftermath of Violence, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 26 (available at Metzger, Molly W The Reconcentration of Poverty: Patterns of Housing Voucher Use, 2000 to 2008, Housing Policy Debate 24 (3): Polikoff, Alexander Racial Equality and the Black Ghetto, Poverty & Race (Nov./Dec.) (available at Polikoff, Alexander Polikoff Responds, Poverty & Race (March/April) (available at Polikoff, Alexander Waiting for Gautreaux. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press Polikoff, Alexander A Moral Imperative for Housing Mobility. (Speech delivered on June 17 in Brooke-Mondale Auditorium at HUD, Washington, DC; available at Popkin, Susan J., Larry F. Buron, Diane K. Levy & Mary K. Cunningham. The Gautreaux Legacy: What Might Mixed-Income and Dispersal Strategies Mean for the Poorest Public Housing Tenants? Housing Policy Debate 11 (4): Rothstein, Richard The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Inst.(available at Rothstein, Richard & Mark Santow The Cost of Living Apart, The American Prospect (available at article/cost-living-apart) Rubinowitz, Leonard S. & James E. Rosenbaum Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press Sampson, Robert J Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiments Meet Social Structure, American Journal of Sociology 114 (1): Sampson, Robert J Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press Samuels, Barbara Nowhere to Live Safe : Moving to Peace and Safety, Poverty & Race (available at Sanbonmatsu, Lisa, Jens Ludwig, Lawrence F. Katz, Lisa A. Gennetian, Greg J. Duncan, Ronald C. Kessler, Emma Adam, Thomas W. McDade & Stacy Tessler Lindau Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program Final Impacts Evaluation. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research (available at Sard, Barbara & Philip Tegeler Sard and Tegeler: Children and Housing Vouchers, NYU Furman Ctr. (available at furmancenter.org/research/iri/sardtegeler) Sharkey, Patrick Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press Shonkoff, Jack P. & Andrew S. Garner The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress. Pediatrics 129 (1): e232-e244 (available at Symposium: A National Gautreaux Program Poverty & Race (Jan./Feb.) (available at Turner, Margery Austin, Austin Nicols & Jennifer Comey, with Kaitlin Franks & David Price Benefits of Living in High- Opportunity Neighborhoods. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Wilson, William Julius More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Wilson, William Julius Why Both Social Structure and Culture Matter in a Holistic Analysis of Inner-City Poverty, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629: Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August 2015

9 Diverse Neighborhoods: The (mis)match Between Attitudes and Actions One of HUD s four programmatic goals is to Build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination. In 2013, HUD s Office of PD&R issued a five-year Research Roadmap that highlighted the importance of but lack of research about the housing search process of racial and ethnic minorities and in particular as it relates to residential segregation and stratification processes. As the Roadmap (HUD Research Roadmap FY2014-FY2018, 2013, p. 98, available at points out: HUD does not know how households search for housing and what their preferences are when searching for housing. Understanding this critical process is foundational for a number of core HUD programs Maria Krysan, with Esther Havekes & Michael D.M. Bader Maria Krysan (krysan@uic.edu) is a Prof. at the Inst. of Government and Public Affairs and the Dept. of Sociology at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago. She studies racial residential segregation and racial attitudes, with a recent emphasis on the housing search process. Esther Havekes (E.A.Havekes@ uu.nl) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Dept. of Sociology at Utrecht Univ. and the Interuniversity Ctr. for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). She is interested in topics at the interface of sociology and (social & urban) geography, such as racial and ethnic concentration, neighborhood disorder and residential mobility. Michael D. M. Bader (bader@ american.edu) is an Assistant Prof. of sociology at American Univ. in Washington, DC where he is also a Faculty Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Ctr. He studies neighborhood racial and economic change in post-civil Rights era American cities. and policies, including the Housing Choice Voucher program, housing integration strategies, and discrimination testing and enforcement. In a forthcoming research article ("Realizing racial and ethnic neighborhood preferences? Exploring the mismatches between what people want, where they search and where they live, to appear in Population Research and Policy Review, published by Springer), which I wrote together with Esther Havekes and Michael D.M. Bader, we heed this call, using an innovative survey conducted in Chicago. We provide compelling patterns that reveal salient racial and ethnic differences in terms of the relationship between where people want to live, where they live, and, importantly, where they look to live. That is, mismatches between their attitudes toward living in diverse neighborhoods and their actions, reflected in the kinds of neighborhoods in which they search and live. What is new about this study is that for the first time we have detailed data on the places people searched for housing and we are then able to explore how the racial composition of those locations relates to what they say they want and where they actually live. Because our interest is in how this speaks to the stubbornly persistent patterns of racial segregation in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, (Please turn to page 10) Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August

10 (Diversity: Continued from page 9) we examine the attitudes and actions related to a neighborhood s racial/ethnic composition in particular. Our data come from a random sample of people aged 21 and older who live in households in Cook County (which includes the city of Chicago) who were interviewed in their homes between August 2004 and August The survey touched on a variety of topics related to neighborhoods, preferences and housing searches, including (1) a measure asking people to create a neighborhood with their ideal racial/ethnic composition; (2) a map showing 41 communities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area that they used to identify communities where they searched during the previous 10 years; and (3) their current residence (so that we could use Census data to determine the racial/ ethnic composition of their current neighborhood). The first salient pattern from our data is that people from all three major racial/ethnic groups in the Chicago area (whites, blacks, and Latinos) report a preference for a diverse neighborhood (see first column of charts in the Figure). Whites report a preference for the greatest percentage of their own group at 46% white residents, the neighborhood falls just short, on average, of being majority white. But whites are the largest group. African Americans and Latinos also create ideal neighborhoods where their own group is the largest but at, on average, 37% and 32%, respectively, their own group is not the numerical majority. The rest of the neighborhood for whites, blacks, and Latinos is comprised of about equal percentages of the other groups they were invited to include (the options they were given were: Hispanics, Arab Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and whites). With these attitudes for a rather remarkable level of neighborhood diversity in mind, we now turn to the two related actions for which we have data. Specifically, how do these attitudes relate to (1) the racial composition of the person s current neighborhood; and, most importantly, (2) where people actually searched for housing. We can examine the level of matches or mismatches. That is, to what extent do people search in the kinds of neighborhoods they say they prefer and, then, to what extent do these search locations match or mismatch the neighborhoods in which people actually live? What we discover is that the kind of (mis)match varies depending on the searcher s race/ethnicity. Beginning with whites, the clear message is that although whites say they want to live in diverse neighborhoods, the places where they search for housing are All groups report wanting to live in more diverse neighborhoods than they currently live in. clearly less diverse compare the fact that the average white searcher says they want, on average, just 46% of their neighbors to be white, but they search in neighborhoods that are on average 68% white (see Column 2 in the Figure). Perhaps not surprisingly, their current neighborhoods reflect the fact that they searched in whiter communities: The average white searcher lives in a neighborhood that is fully 74% white (see Column 3 in the Figure). For African Americans and Latinos, the plot is different but the punchline the same as for whites. On the one hand, all three groups fail to live in the racially diverse neighborhoods that they say they want. But the plot differs because both African Americans and Latinos search locations match quite closely their attitudes a pattern that was not true for whites. Specifically, Blacks say they want, on average, a 37% black neighborhood and they search in neighborhoods that are on average about that level, 40% black (see Column 2 in the Figure). Where things fall apart for African Americans is in the step from searching to moving despite searching in diverse neighborhoods, blacks end up living in neighborhoods that are on average 66% black (see Column 3 in the Figure). A similar, though less extreme pattern occurs for Latinos: They search in diverse neighborhoods where Latinos are, on average, just 32% of the residents (thus matching their stated preferences), but they end up living in just over majority Latino (51%) neighborhoods (Column 3 in the Figure). 1 Whites most salient mismatch is between where they say they want to live and where they search and then live. But African Americans and Latinos experience the greater mismatch at a later stage they search in the diverse neighborhoods they say they want, but for some reason they end up moving into less diverse neighborhoods. The reasons for these mismatches are not clear in our data, but there are several possibilities. Whites may be overstating a desire to live in racially diverse neighborhoods out of social desirability pressures in the direction of feeling a need to report to their interviewer that they want a diverse neighborhood. But their actions speak louder than these words. 2 Alternatively, whites may have blind spots to racially diverse neighborhoods meaning that their knowledge of the different communities and neighborhoods in their region is limited and they are unaware of where to search for the diverse neighborhoods they say they want (see P&R, Vol. 17, No. 5, 2008). Finally, it may also be that the diverse neighborhoods that 1 Although the results reported here are for average percentages within each racial/ ethnic group, parallel analyses that look at the percentage of respondents within a racial/ethnic group whose stated preference, search locations, and current neighborhoods are +/-15% points show the same pattern. These detailed results will be reported in the published article. 2 Although this may be due in part to a lack of neighborhoods available that match their preferences, we note that the map of 41 communities that we presented to respondents over-represented racially diverse communities so that there were communities that matched their stated preferences (see published article for more details). 10 Poverty & Race Vol. 24, No. 4 July/August 2015